Luke Morris

3/16/2004

From Reading to Writing

            I learned to write by reading.  Well, that isn’t exactly true; learning to decipher symbols on a page and learning to make them myself did not happen simultaneously.  Better to say that I learned to write well by reading.  No, no, on second glance, that’s egotistic, I don’t have nearly a big enough horn to toot here.  How about this:  I learned to write the way I do by reading.  Yes, that’s better.

            I read a lot in my youth.  Big books, small books, good books, bad books, kiddie books, grown-up books, I read them all.  I started out simple, with the Hardy Boys and Judy Blume and Ralph the Motorcycle Mouse, eventually working my way up to Madeleine L’Engle, Roald Dahl, and C.S. Lewis.  The Chronicles of Narnia gave me my first glimpse of what great writing could be, and it inspired in me a drive to discover whether my own mind hid such treasures.  I became hungry for more books, which I would devour with a silly grin the moment I could get to the library, tasting every word, smacking my lips in suspense as the stories drew me on, drooling in anticipation of each climactic moment.  I read everything, so long as it was fiction.  The untrue was more real to me than any sensible thing I had ever known.

            It’s not that my life was terrible.  Just boring.  Granted, I tried to spice it up now and then, but a kid can only get into so many fights at public elementary school in a single day, and schoolyard football games don’t happen when we’re grounded.  Most of the time, I needed activity, and my brain needed nourishment.  So my third re-reading of Lewis finally convinced me to make some new friends, and I became acquainted with Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, and those wretched Choose Your Own Adventure books.

            Well, you can’t win them all.  At least I can say I was reading, which kept me away from the mental suction tube that swallowed the minds of so many of my generation.  Oh, I watched television occasionally; I never could claim immunity to the powers of peer influence and Saturday morning cartoons, or to the desire to relax my mental muscles after a full day of contending with the teacher’s sales pitch on Darwin and Black Literature.  Still, the quick-fix images that the TV offered never eased my mind or fed the creative creature within me.

            Unfortunately, my teachers often fed that creature a poisoned breakfast.  Though I am sure they meant well, having to read things like Tuck Everlasting and Bridge to Terabithia nearly dropped me into depression, and I might have despaired of ever trying to put pen to paper.  But then I met Tolkien.  The Lord of the Rings released me from the drudgery of sixth grade, it gave my life meaning, and it lifted me to new summits of fancy, from which I gazed upon the brave old world its author had created.  From that high peak, I knew what I would do, where my life would go.  Though I didn’t know when or how, I knew that I would become a writer.  I would tell my own stories, create my own world, find words to express the magic hidden in my own mind; all I needed to do was to learn how.

            The learning process has taken longer than I expected.  I am still nowhere near that summit upon which I briefly stood, and it may be a long time yet before I reach it.  But now, finally, I’m working for it. 

            You see, after reading Tolkien for the first time, I fell into a pit of self-pity.  After reading the one book to rule them all, what was left to live for?  My mind had touched the top, and that was it.  Nothing in the literary world could ever match what I had already read, I had never heard of anything that even came close, so why should I bother?  I still needed to read, though, because I was still desperate to write, which left me in a dire predicament – I did not know how. 

            I finished grade school and moved on, occasionally lifting a pen to see what kind of verbal damage I could cause, always with a burning desire to write the great story.  It did not happen.  My imagination moved faster than my mind could follow: the short story became a long story, the long story a novella, the novella a full-fledged novel, and the novel an epic, all inside my brain, without words.  By the time I had started to pour the tale out on paper, it had overflowed my mental cup to the point where I despaired of ever realizing the vision in my head.  I got two or three pages in – barely the start of an exposition – and my mind was swamped, I threw down my pen, the idea drowned in my skull under a wave of frustration.  I would go to the TV to flush my mind of thought.

            But the books pulled me back.  I was compelled, I had to pick them up, read them, escape my world and enter theirs, if only for a brief time.  And the Muse would return, stronger than ever.  A great story, well told!  I must try that myself.  I must show the world that I can do that, too; that I too can remake the world in my own image, different, wonderful, mysterious and beautiful.

I felt inspired to imitate.  That was the secret.

It took a long time, though.  Throughout high school and afterwards I covered many literary bases, from the shit to the sublime.  No one author taught me to write, but they were all my teachers.  I remember no moment of enlightenment, but I made many discoveries on the trip, bits and pieces I picked up from the road and combined with others.  I read Shakespeare and Stephen King, Mark Twain and Michael Crichton, Ernest Hemingway and John Grisham; not always with a careful eye for what was good and what was not, but always with a mind open for new ideas, new things to say, new ways of saying what had been said before.  And that, really, is how I learned to write – by reading.